Man Made Deuterium

Rather than create it, one could separate it from other isotopes.

A Russian group has published papers about using a Van de Graff generator to generate deuterons, the nuclei of deuterium atoms. That, or you could try nucleosynthesis, like in the cores of stars. Or you could try splitting helium nuclei - but good luck with that one, too.

Let me ask you, if you are nuts. Deuterium, or heavy water is available at the price of good beer at any amount. Why on earth would you want to produce it, when it would be real expensive?? Answer that!

I am a little bit curious to know, comparing a man made hydrocarbons against deuterium.

Burning hydrocarbons produces undesirable effects on environment and takes a million years aging organic materials & conditions to produce such fuel. The earth becomes more and more toxic bringing out these chemicals.

However, deuterium is a good choice as a fuel in the future, impact might not be that bad as "hydrocarbons". I want to see the regenerative side of it(how fast to replenish), if it only needs just pressure or a not so stringent process, comparing to reversing byproducts of combustion, whatever.

We have lots of deuterium reserves here in our country but so sad, there is nobody interested to learn or research a technology.

Me, i just want to be informed.

Do you have deuterium confused with something else? Deuterium is heavy hydrogen with a proton and a neutron in the nucleus.

How would you use deuterium as fuel? I see there are a dozen patents which claim to use deuterium as a better fuel in fuel cells. You can see an eyebrow being cocked as I write this.

Are you referring to Ultra-Heavy deuterium? This has been touted as a possible way to get controlled fusion. I dunno....like a lot of things like that, you gotta wonder if it takes more energy to make it than you would ever get from it! However, there are some good articles on the interwebs. I can't imagine ever being part of such a cool project, but you never know!

Thanks for the tip.

Are you referring to Ultra-Heavy deuterium?

By ultra-heavy deuterium do you mean tritium?

Of course the sun is a fusion reaction, but research is very, very far from being able to do that. At this stage it takes bunches more energy than it produces.

No. It is a fuel for fusion reactors. Here is a link.

It 'could' become a fuel for fusion reactors. Interesting link, thanks Yusef.

Have in mind that this "material" is only existing for some picoseconds -

compressed by the recoil of vaporised outer regions.

Any concept of a fusion reactor needs some Tritium that is much more easy to produce if Deuterium is within the reaction chamber.

Tritium and Deterium extraction and recirculation is one important feature of any fusion reaction so also with the ITER experiment that shall show the possibility of a permanent burning plama that is generating more energy (heat) as needed to heat up the plasma (by a current).

So any report about extra heavy Deuterium is misleading as this refers to laser-fusion and laser fusion is pushed by the US at NIF only for military reasons of investigations into the first moments of fusion of a thermonuclear bomb.

France is building a similar experiment and Great Britain may follow.

If you look at the ease of money allocation then you can easily distinguish between military and civilian projects.

RHABE

Boy, you are a bucket of cold water poured over the head arn't you? Wasnt it you that proved that a bumblebee could not fly by established engineering principles?

(Just kidding. Don't know enough about the subject to speculate on its usefulness, but I DID answer your question...its not tritium, its "heavy deuterium". I am still waiting for the OP to decide whether that is what he was talking about, or was it ordinary easily obtained cheap heavy water he is was referring to. It sort of makes a difference in potential response dontcha think?)

Oh and a good answer by the way.

Noudge79,

You're new here. After you have been around here for awhile you will come to realize that many "Guests" are just rude idiots who only want to disrupt things and insult people, such as poster #3.

Best to just ignore them, as you would an insect.

Although poster #3 may be rude, he (or she) also happens to be correct. Deuterium is hardly rare. Separating it from other hydrogen is somewhat of an issue, but again, not terribly difficult.

The question remains, what is special about deuterium other than the extra neutron in the nucleus. It is useful in a heavy-water reactor, but those are hardly being constructed in vast numbers. Other than it's ability to slow or stop high-energy neutrons, what advantage would there be to using heavy hydrogen in energy production other than to drive up the cost of one of the reagents? To my knowledge (admittedly limited), it otherwise behaves as any other hydrogen.

osborne83,

Neither you, nor the troll, actually address the OP's question..

The OP didn't ask about the availability or uses of deuterium but asked if there was, "any means to create" it.

Any questions remaining are the product of your imagination, not Noudge79,'s original question.

Can you make it?

Granted, I did not answer the question. I also likely read too much into it, fed by other comments regarding the use of deuterium.

Still, I am left wondering why one would want to create deuterium other than as a purely scientific exercise.

Its Ok lynlynch, atleast they are learning, that is if they wanted to learn. Honestly, we throw sometimes insignificant questions to validate either one is knowledgeable/experienced or not.

It is expected that you get alot freebees in a forum like these. Experts opinion cost much in the real world. Well, atleast we bring the service of education for those who are rookies and science fanatics.

Science & engineering is a broad field, its impossible one can master all field, well, good thing there is CR4. =)

1. by bombarding ordinary hydrogen with neutrons, in a reactor or an accelerator.

2. by separating heavy water (deuterium oxide) from ordinary water by various processes, then electrolyzing the heavy water into deuterium and oxygen.

Create Deuterium: with heavy neutron flux interacting with hydrogen some neutrons are caught (with a low probability) and built into a new atomic nucleus of D and even rarer as Tritium (instable by radioactive decay).

As stated above the Deuterium atom is arranged of one proton one neutron and one electron.

This is not a fuel but used as moderator in some nuclear reactor types - as the CANDU and its follow up types made and promoted by AECL.com, very useful but most deciding people did not learn as this reactor types are suited to burn low grade Uranium (from no enrichment to 1.5% enrichment). Enrichment is a costly and not very effective procedure and gives a pathway to nuclear weapons - so natural = non-enriched Uranium is much safer also with this aspect.

And these reactors can also burn Thorium and also the other heavy elements that make the biggest problems in highly active radioactive waste. This has to be stored safely for 200 to 500-thousand years as coming from todays reactors, but this necessary safe storage time can be reduced to 2000 to 5000 years if the trans-uranium elements are extracted and used as fuel in the CANDU-type reactors.

A moderator in a nuclear reactor is slowing down the fast neutrons from fission-reactions to thermal velocities where the probability of capture by another atom is high, so the next uranium atom can undergo fission by first capturing this neutron.

So something must be wrong in the first question and the ideas to use Deuterium.

Deuterium was first made by electrolytic production of hydrogen and oxygen from water. In this process the water molecules built not of H2O but of HDO have a low probability of being split, so Deuterium in the form of HDO and D2O is enriched.

This was first started in Norway in a large hydroelectric power plant around 1940. After it was known that with deuterium it is much easier to build a nuclear reactor and this may make possible the production of nuclear weapons the NAZI-troops that occupied Norway organised a transport of the existing stockpile with destination to Germany. The British secret service together with Norwegian partisans succeeded in sinking this transport by a bomb placed on the transport ferry. Only a few years ago the wrecked ferryboat and the remaining drums were located and brought to the surface again and still contained the heavy water.

Back to the original post: the oceans contain a lot of heavy water but separation is costly.

There has been a commercial fabrication by Girdler company that used the difference in absorption-desorption of hydrogen-sulphide (as H2S, HDS and D2S) in cold and hot water. This yielded a concentration (in multi-stage absorption-desorption columns) from 150ppm to 20%. The further concentration to above 99% was done by vacuum distillation.

The problem of maybe proliferation of nuclear weapons is not solved by the use of heavy water as a moderator as with heavy water reactors and a reprocessing facility a Plutonium production can be done.

RHABE

GA.

There is much more to this but this is definitely not the right place to discuss such complex matters. A simple search would have explained the guts of it.

Thanks for making sense, Ky.

This is not a fuel but used as moderator in some nuclear reactor types - as the CANDU and its follow up types made and promoted by AECL.com, very useful but most deciding people did not learn as this reactor types are suited to burn low grade Uranium (from no enrichment to 1.5% enrichment). Enrichment is a costly and not very effective procedure and gives a pathway to nuclear weapons - so natural = non-enriched Uranium is much safer also with this aspect.

And these reactors can also burn Thorium and also the other heavy elements that make the biggest problems in highly active radioactive waste. This has to be stored safely for 200 to 500-thousand years as coming from todays reactors, but this necessary safe storage time can be reduced to 2000 to 5000 years if the trans-uranium elements are extracted and used as fuel in the CANDU-type reactors.

Is this the fast neutron reactor I have read good things about? I heard it can also use the waste from present reactors as fuel--is this true?

This is not the fast neutron reactor, as this is existing only as a concept and from concept to proof to a commercially viable prototype or series is a long way to go.

CANDU and successors and other reactors that are moderated by heavy water use the superior moderating possibility of heavy water - thus enabling much more efficient neutron capture and chain-reaction with low grade fuel down to natural uranium, thorium and reprocessed waste from other reactors. (The high activity part of the trans-uranium elements.)

The CANDU and successors have another very important feature: they use only a small amount of heavy water circulating in tubes around the fuel elements and these immersed in ordinary (very hot) water for steam production.

So if either one of the inner tubes is leaking or breaking then heavy water will stream to the fuel-rods, this will come out as steam and shut down the nuclear chain-reaction as no longer enough moderator existent. And the same will happen with a leak of the heavy water tubes to the outer water vessel. This would not produce steam but dilute the heavy water and thus stop the chain-reaction.

Thus the inherent safety of this concept is much better than with any other known or existing type of reactor.

There are more benefits (see aecl) but the market power of the big 4 (GE, Siemens, France, Russia) will not allow an outside choice and the upcoming states (China and India) pursuing their own concept that are partially derived from CANDU but not thought a commercial competitor outside their native countries today.

RHABE

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Is there any means to create plutonium?

Just asking - you know

Plutonium does not occur in nature, but rather, is created as a product of uranium fission in a reactor. So, yes, there is a means to create plutonium in nuclear reactors. In fact, that's where it all comes from.

Plutonium is an unwanted byproduct of fission.

If weapons grade is wanted then only very short reprocessing intervals are needed else reactor-grade plutonium will be produced that is not suitable for nuclear weapons and unwanted as byproduct as very very very poisonous.

As long as there exists enough uranium (some 1000 years without doubt) and then much more thorium to be burnt in CANDU type reactors (heavy water moderated) there is no need for plutonium if not for primitive nuclear weapons.

What are they producing in Dimonah? Enriched Uranium would be much better but require much more effort.

What do the Iranians plan in the various plants - no doubt both: uranium enrichment and plutonium production.

RHABE

I was only teasing - in response to the OP on top...

I'm not really interested in acquiring plutonium, or any other fissionables - or fussionables for that matter.

My intent was to point out the obviously weird case of someone asking an engineering forum, about ways to procure or produce key materials for the construction of WOMD.

My surprise was, the openness and ease of the response to such an enquiry, given that biochemical and nuclear weaponised devices are very much sought of by fringe terror groups, and given the ease such doomsday devices are technically discussed online.

A deeper, more disturbing aspect of all this is the openness it's conveyed and the growing number of young people interested in the obliteration of life on earth.

This underlines the dark possibility that human life on earth has become to be portrayed more as a nightmare than an incredible opportunity for some 80 years of fulfilment and possible happiness

That's all

Yuval, I share your concern, but I assume that the real secrets are safeguarded (hopefully).

You know how much damage lunatic persons as dictators can inflict on people! (Hitler)

What is missing in this world is a police organisation (international) that watches these possible candidates and as soon as they are starting to be mass murderers (thresh-hold at how many ?) there should be a "wanted" poster, saying "dead or alive" 10M$ reward.

This would help a bit but not if the culprits are fundamentalistic and lunatic.

Back to the Deuterium question: there will be (hopefully) a widespread use as moderator in nuclear power plants. This may free us from the ultra-long storage time of used nuclear fuel as with much more reactivity the trans-uraniums can be burnt too.

Enjoy your life, tomorrow there may be bigger problems existing.

RHABE